New Zealand! First impressions:
There is WATER here!! Years of Californian drought have parched not only the landscape I have lived in but also my ability to imagine that there might be water elsewhere - well, there is, and it’s in New Zealand! Big swollen brown rivers of it, and smaller milky brown streams, ribbons that carve and snake through bright green hills and seem about to burst their banks. These shaggy hills and valleys an absolute riot of greens, the landscape and flora a mix of out-of-place familiars - Mexico, the Marin Headlands, Hawaii, Vancouver Island - a primeval jungle/forest quite jurassic in nature. An admix of palms and pines, papyrus and plum trees, jacaranda trees, yellow broom, giant fern-tree like things. One of the next things that strikes me is the way the clouds are hanging - massive & low, in that very particular and intense way that makes the earth and sky seem perfect equals in weight and volume, 2 balanced parts of a whole. The clouds are fluffy and full, some white with air, some pewter with water, but where and when the sun does shine, these hills glow, entire small craggy mountains of luminescent green. Perhaps cut by generations of habitual grazing paths, some slopes almost appear terraced, and the sheep grazing upon them like little white figurines arranged on the shelves of your dotty aunt. There is a field with the most curious of cows - very shaggy, striped in 3 equal parts - black at head and tail & white in the center - like a hairy oreo cookie on four legs! Even more curiouser, Dear Alice, is the vast green field we passed earlier, again dotted with sheep, but these not gathered flock-like, as I presume sheep would gather and clump together, but rather spaced out in an almost perfect geometry, each with their own carefully observed biosphere of personal space around them… tufts of cotton on a quilt, remarkably odd. When I finally reach my reward today, after 29 hours travel (29 hours of cars, airplanes, buses, the common horror of shopping malls where I have had to wait for way too many hours for one bus to pick me up where the other left me), when I finally get to my bunk bed in a shared room in the backpackers hostel, I am quite sure I will collapse. Hopefully after having showered.
1 Comment
Shelly kushin
10/5/2015 09:43:04 pm
You are an amazing writer. I am so enjoying your blog!
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